Tuesday, 10 November 2009

Type design: Part 01

I’ve been trying to devise a system of type design that might make use of the geometrical shapes in faces like Rockwell (below) but take into account the balance of lettering along the baseline. On close inspection it can be found that, for instance, the ‘p’ of a serif like Baskerville will extend very slightly higher than the ‘u’. It’s easy to neglect the finer details of legibility, like that, when working primarily with geometric shapes.

The first attempt was more rigid than I’d hoped for at first. The second is less rigid but still quite narrow. On a third attempt I refined the slab-serifs and widened the letter grid. The ‘e’ still needs some work and many more letters are yet to be drawn with this grid so my next post on the subject should show progress.